After less that two years online, Battleborn is coming to an end

Even though Battleborn has not been out that long, Gearbox has announced that the Fall Update will be its last. After that, the game will slip into maintenance mode with Gearbox maintaining a small crew to tend to servers and patch big bugs.

“As of this week, there will be no more Battleplans, and there is currently no planned content after the Fall Update,” said Varnell. However, he added that the servers would remain online “for the foreseeable future.”

Varnell did not speak specifically on why the Battleborn team was wrapping up. He only mentioned that he is moving on to play a significant role in some other unnamed (but highly anticipated) Gearbox title. Of course, everybody knows the project he was referring to is Borderlands 3.

As CEO Randy Pitchford lightheartedly put it as he segued into the Borderlands segment of the 2016 PAX West panel (video - starts at about the 49-minute mark), “Look, it’s no secret that we are working hard on some stuff. We’re going to talk about some stories from the past... but we’re not announcing anything that you guys don’t already know about today, all right. Get over it.”

The tongue-in-cheek remark was clearly a nod and a wink at fans that they are working on Borderlands 3. Pitchford and crew also made it clear that the third game in the beloved series was being worked on during PAX East 2016 and more recently showed what it would look like in Unreal Engine 4.

Varnell’s admission that he is moving on to a new project is not likely the only reason that Battleborn is entering its twilight phase.

While he didn’t bring it up, it's hard to ignore that Overwatch has completely eclipsed Battleborn. Although the game came out of the gates strong when it was released on May 3, 2016, the number of concurrent players for Battleborn on Steam plummeted a couple of weeks later with the release of Overwatch and now struggles to maintain more than 100 players at any given time.

It would appear that Gearbox is conceding defeat in the team-shooter arena but players who like the game can still look forward to the Fall Update. The patch will contain new skins (including some Borderlands-themed skins), title art improvements, gameplay fixes and new Finisher Boosts and Taunts. The update will also tweak the balancing.

You can check out Varnell’s full post on Gearbox’s blog and pick up a Shift Code for Deande's "Intelligence" skin while you are there.

The game was doomed from the beginning. I'm not sure why they tried to compete with Overwatch. If it had come out a full year before OW maybe it'd have done better, but everyone I played with quit to go over to OW It took way too long to unlock all the characters too

I enjoyed their WWII shooters, the Brothers in Arms trilogy and spent a good few hours playing them but the Borderland franchise doesn't appeal to me. To my mind Gearbox games has gone backwards since then but the sales figures tell a different story. I'd never ever heard of this Battleborn thing until I read this article.

The game was doomed from the beginning. I'm not sure why they tried to compete with Overwatch. If it had come out a full year before OW maybe it'd have done better, but everyone I played with quit to go over to OW It took way too long to unlock all the characters too

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They didnt try. Battleborn was announced first, then got steamrolled. Overwatch and battleborn do also play differently, despite appearances.

the big thing that let it down was, as is usual, gearbox. When they knew overwatch was coming, they should have made the game free to play, seeing as how they were intent on stuffing it full of micro-transactions anyway. That way players could have picked it up without worrying about saving money for overwatch instead.

Instead, randy pitchford's amazing (sarcasm) PR skills led them instead to release the game then drop the price a few weeks later pissing off consumers, then made it free to play after pissing them off AGAIN with micro-transactions on an already too small player base.